In a time of emerging technologies, while artificial intelligence and adaptability of robots is getting better, a new problem may come up: will machines monopolize all active positions in our society? This fear is already topical and enabled resurgence and modernization of the Luddite thinking.(1)

Spaceweaver's insight:

Interesting article with quite a few Global Brain ideas such as the eventual merging of humans and machines.

In conclusion, facing a possible evaporation of human performed labor, we have seen above that possible solutions could be radical. History requires us attention as it left its traces in eugenic past approaches which mark our civilization of their violence. But nothing requires us to make same mistakes, as long as those who refuse to enter into this logic of mankind enhancement are not placed on the side and ostracized, and as long as our human empathy remains at the center of our values. However, it’s interesting to note that above developments seem so radical that, except prospectivists like Ray Kurzweil or Robin Hanson, most cultural works appropriating them describe dystopias. They act as whistleblowers, because in fact, this issue raises the question of what we want to make of our society. We must be careful not to distort our humanity while appropriating these technologies and the tremendous benefits they could bring us, and improve our quality of life. After having used “Birth” value as discriminant element at the center of agrarian societies, and afterwards “Work” value at the center of industrial societies... maybe it’s time to put “Knowledge” value at the center, knowledge in a sense of enrichment of people like Gene Roddenberry imagined it when he conceptualized the utopian world of Star Trek."

The Global Brain can be defined as the self-organizing network formed by all people on this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect and support them. As the Internet becomes faster, smarter, and more encompassing, it increasingly links its users into a single information processing system, which functions like a nervous system for the planet Earth. The intelligence of this system is collective and distributed: it is not localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. It rather emerges from the interactions between all its components—a property characteristic of a complex adaptive system. Such a distributed intelligence may be able to tackle current and emerging global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches. Yet, at the same time it will create technological and social challenges that are still difficult to imagine, transforming our society in all aspects.

BITNATION is a fully inclusive governance system. BITNATION offers a full range of services traditionally done by governments. We provide a cryptographically secure ID system, blockchain based dispute resolution, marriage and divorce, land registery, education, insurance, security, diplomacy, and more through a fully distributed platform.

...Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket. This is the sense in which it doesn't matter. You can do it today. How it works today isn't how it's going to work in the future but you don't need to wait twenty years for it. Anybody can make almost anything almost anywhere.

...Finally, when I could own all these machines I got that the Renaissance was when the liberal arts emerged—liberal for liberation, humanism, the trivium and the quadrivium—and those were a path to liberation, they were the means of expression. That's the moment when art diverged from artisans. And there were the illiberal arts that were for commercial gain. ... We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans.

Not long ago, after you bought a new vehicle, the manufacturer had very little contact with you for years until it was time to sell you another car. The Internet of Things is changing all that. The IoT-enabled “connected car” turns the vehicle itself into a hub for an entire ecosystem of connected services that offer consumers a wealth of benefits including enhanced safety and security, a richer user experience and a new suite of product offerings. From the manufacturer’s perspective, this also helps establish an ongoing customer relationship as well as incremental revenue streams over the life of the vehicle.

Apple Pay is up and running and digital wallets are back in the limelight. Are merchants, consumers, and the market ready for mass adoption of digital wallets? Google Wallet’s poor early uptake comes to mind four years after its launch in 2011.

The self-organisation of collective behaviours often manifests as dramatic patterns of emergent large-scale order. This is true for relatively “simple” entities such as microbial communities and robot “swarms,” through to more complex self-organised systems such as those displayed by social insects, migrating herds, and many human activities. The principle of stigmergy describes those self-organised phenomena that emerge as a consequence of indirect communication between individuals of the group through the generation of persistent cues in the environment. Interestingly, despite numerous examples of multicellular behaviours of bacteria, the principle of stigmergy has yet to become an accepted theoretical framework that describes how bacterial collectives self-organise. Here we review some examples of multicellular bacterial behaviours in the context of stigmergy with the aim of bringing this powerful and elegant self-organisation principle to the attention of the microbial research community.

In his 1957 science fiction novel The Naked Sun Isaac Asimov invented a world, Solaria, in which a tiny, fixed population of humans live out their days on enormous estates, waited upon by scores of robots. The Solarians' social ambience is something like that of a 19th Century Russian novel. A scrupulous attention to social mores and rankings is only enhanced by this bizarre fact - delivered from material want or the requirement for sex (all procreation is scientifically managed in "birthing centres" a la Brave New World), they have evolved a severe taboo against physical proximity of any kind. Indeed, the Solarians never even occupy the same room together, let alone touch, and any intercourse between them takes the form of "holographic telepresence", a sort of 3D conference call. So, instead of visiting one another, the Solarians indulge in what they term "viewing".

Like all the best science fiction, Asimov's was as much about his own era as any remote future. Writing in the late 1950s, he saw all around him the consequences of automated production and distribution combined with telecommunications - namely, a steady decline in the number and duration of the personal contacts an individual needed to make during any given day. But if the Eisenhower years betokened an emergent world of shiny and machined efficiency, decoupled from the visceral vagaries of human biology, then how much more like Solaria has our own world become in the intervening half-century?

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